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Crisis of the Late Middle Ages
The Crisis of the Late Middle Ages lasted from about 1337 AD until 1455 AD. It began on the eve of the Hundred Years’ War between the two leading European powers of the day; France and England. It then ended around 1455. Many dates could be chosen for the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age: the innovation of the movable type printing press in 1455; the death of the first great patron of the Age of Discovery in 1460, Henry the Navigator; the fall of Constantinople in 1453; or even 1500, because its a nice round number. The 14th and 15th centuries were both a foundation period for modern Europe, and an era of crisis, famine, war, and plague. The famine of 1415-17 and Black Death reduced the population perhaps by half. The Hundred Years’ War saw England and France fight out 116-year-long stalemate, from which both emerged with a strengthened the sense of national identity. It first established the European Balance of Power that would dominate the continent for 500 years, which nations engaging in a permanent economic and intellectual rivalry, an ongoing arms race, and eventually competitive colonialism. Meanwhile, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 finally marked the end of the more than two-millenia of Roman civilisation, and the beginning of the Muslim Ottoman Turkish Empire as a power in Europe. Despite these crises, the 14th century was also a time of great progress in the arts and learning. Following a renewed interest in ancient Greek and Roman texts that took root, The Renaissance began whose influence was felt in literature, philosophy, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. History Hundred Years' War (1337–1360) The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) was in many ways simply an intensification of the conflict between France and England that had already been ongoing for over three centuries, and would continue for four centuries afterwards, only ending with the Entente Cordial of 1904. Its roots can be traced back to the origins of the English royal family itself. Ever since Duke William of Normandy conquered England in 1066, his descendants were able to lay claim to lands on both sides of the English Channel. In these continental lands, they were vassals of the French king, and the fact that they were kings of England in their own rights didn't change that. In particular, the French king could hear appeals that subjects of a vassal might make against their lord; Philip II Augustus in particular had made judicious use of this as pretext to strip English kings of their French land. The resulting struggle spanned centuries during which the royal family crowned in Westminster sought to retain their territory, while royal family crowned in Reims strove with more success to assert their authority over the whole geographical region of France. By the time of Louis IX of France (d. 1270) only the Duchy of Aquitaine in the southwest remained in English hands. Any medieval struggle was not just one of warfare, but a complex game of dynastic marriages. The princes of great families married within the same limited circle, thus becoming an interconnected web of cousins. The marriage in 1308 of the son and daughter of Edward Longshanks of England and Philip IV of France was meant to seal a peace. Instead the crossing of the English and French royal bloodlines would produce an eventual English claimant to the French throne itself, and the longest and bitterest conflict, spanning the mid-14th and mid-15th centuries. This was a clash between the two most powerful nations in Europe: France had a population of about 18 million and England about 4 million, both had strong centralised governments with rudimentary parliaments, and both had embryonic senses of national identity. By a happy accident, the Carolingian Dynasty, descended from Hugh Capet (d. 996), had succeeded to the French throne, father-to-son, without conflict for twelves generations. But in the early 14th-century, the dynasty's luck finally ran out. Between 1316 and 1328, three brothers ascended to the French throne in succession, all leaving no male heir. When the last died, Charles IV (1322-1328), for the first time in almost 350 years, there was a succession crisis in France. The man nearest in blood was King Edward III of England (1327-77), a nephew of the last three kings through his mother, Isabella of France. The choice of successor was left to an assembly of French nobles, who instead awardeds the crown to another nephew, Philip VI (1328-1350 AD); the House of Valois would go on to rule France until 1589. The English king at first to reluctantly accept the decision, distracted by his own internal struggle with Roger Mortimer (d. 1330). However, tensions between the two kings gradually grew: the French king renewed the Auld Alliance with Scotland, and made strenuous efforts to assert greater control over ever-independent Flanders, a region crucial to England's wool trade. The final spark that lit the fire was a disgraced French noble, Robert of Artois (d. 1342), who fled into exile in England in 1337. When Edward III refused to surrender him to French justice, Philip VI declared that he was formally confiscating Aquitaine, on the grounds of breaching his obligations as vassal. War was now inevitable. The English response was dramatic; in January 1340, Edward III revived his claim to French throne, undoubtedly a declaration of war. The opening hostilities of the Hundred Years' War were for control of the English Channel. Neither England nor France had a purpose-built navy, and instead relied on merchant vessels or vessels hired from Genoa. Medieval naval battles employed much the same tactics as on the battlefield; after a brief exchange of arrows, grapples were used to bring ships close, followed by boarding and a desperate bloody fight at close-quarters on the wooden decks. English victory at the Battle of Sluys (June 1340) proved decisive. Two military innovations, developed during the frequent wars with Scotland, served the English well. The first was the superiority of the longbow over traditional crossbows. It was probably developed in Wales during the 12th century, and fired heavier arrows more accurately at a faster rate. Furthermore, damp bowstrings could be replaced much more quickly. The longbow had first been used to devastating effect against the Scots at the Battle of Falkirk (1298). The second innovation was a growing professionalism, with greater coordination between the knightly elites and common-born infantrymen, bowmen, and sailors. By comparison, the French infantry were an ill-armed, ill-trained rabble, as likely to be ridden down by their own side as killed by the enemy, with hotblooded noble knights seeing any delay in charging as an affront to their honour. At the little known Battle of Sluys, the French navy was almost completely destroyed or captured, giving the English control over the Channel. Crucially this meant that the war would take place on French soil. Plagued by money problems with fierce opposition to taxation to fund overseas adventures, it would be six years before Edward could mount his first major campaign across the Channel. His solution was a ceaseless anti-French propaganda campaign and to bind the nobility to himself through chivalric honour, pomp, and ceremony. He introduced the Order of the Garter, and was the first English king to actively encourage jousting tournaments. By 1346, the English were able to cross the Channel with a force of 15,000 men, and landed in Normandy, catching the French by surprise; the attack had been expected through English Aquitaine, or rebellious and ever-independent Flanders or Brittany. While Edward spent the summer ravaging and pillaging the countryside, Philip mustered a large French army to oppose him. The armies met at the Battle of Crécy (August 1346), near the coast. The English took up a strong defensive position on a hillside ideal for archers, to face a much larger French army. Again and again the French cavalry thundered up the slope in the face of the barrage of English arrows, occasionally reaching the enemy frontline, only to be repulsed by pikemen. For the English, the battle proved the effectiveness of tactics that would bring many future victories, while the French seemed to learn little from their heavy casualties, perhaps 15,000 in all including 1,200 knights. These losses crippled the French army's ability to come to the aid of the port-city of Calais, which fell to the English after an 11 month siege; it remained in English hands long after the Hundred Year' War until 1558. After the fall of Calais, there was a long period of low intensity hostility, with the whole of Europe distracted by a far more serious threat, the Black Death. In 1355, after the plague had passed and England was able to recover financially, the son of Edward III, Edward the Black Prince (d. 1376), landed with his army in Aquitaine. After a campaign of ravaging and pillaging the surrounding countryside, the Black Prince was outflanked by a larger French army commanded by the French king, John II (1350-64), near the town of Poitiers. Edward seemed willing to accept terms, but the French insisted on total surrender. Thus the English positioned themselves on a brief slope, well protected by hawthorn hedges, between a river on one side and dense forest on the other, offering the French only one route of attack. The Battle of Poitiers (September 1356) was a three-day affair with a truce brokered by the papal legate on the middle day. The day revealed once again, the contrast between the romantically amateur French view of warfare and the new professionalism of the English. While the French knights treated their day off as a holiday of drinking and socialising, the English were digging trenches and making fences. On the final day, the English defensive position held through a combination of hails of arrows and ambushes, followed by sudden cavalry charges that threw the French vanguard into disarray. The rearguard fought with great resolve, with King John II winning renown for his personal courage. But by the end of the day, his army was overwhelmed, and the French king himself a prisoner of the English. King John spent the next four years in captivity, during the protracted negotiations of the Treaty of Brétigny (1360). In addition to a huge ransom, Aquitaine was restored to its original size and Calais was formally ceded to the English. Thus the first phase of the war had ended on very favourable terms for the English. France meanwhile lay devastated, territorially dismembered, in a state of disaffection and lawlessness, and economically crippled for a generation by John's ransom. But there were many more twists and turns to come in the Hundred Years' War. Black Death (1346–1353) The 14th century saw the growth and prosperity that Europe had enjoyed during the previous three centuries come to a dramatic halt. The continent had already been inflicted by a Europe-wide crop failures and famines from 1315-1317. Then in 1347, it was stuck by one of the most devastating pandemics in human history, the Black Death. This unusually virulent strain of Bubonic Plague is thought to have originated in the steppes of Central Asia. It devastated China in the 1330s, probably contributing to widespread widespread peasant uprisings that prompted the fall of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, from which emerged the native Ming Dynasty. This lethal infection then made its way westwards along the Silk Road reaching the Turkish ports in the Crimea by 1347; at the time the Silk Road was easier to travel than ever before thanks to the Mongols. From there, Genoese and Venetian merchants brought it home to Europe, most likely carried by fleas living on the black rats who were regular passengers on merchant ships. Sicily was the first part of Europe to be infected in October 1347, soon followed by international ports of Genoa and Venice. During 1348, the disease spread through most of Continental Europe, reaching England in late 1348, Norway the following year, and finally Sweden in 1350, the last kingdom to feel the effects. As described by Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani (d. 1363), "it was a plague that touched people of every condition, age and sex. They began to spit blood and then they died; some immediately some in two or three days, and some in a longer time. Most had swellings in the groin, and many had them in the left and right armpits and in other places; one could almost always find an unusual swelling somewhere on the victim's body." The results everywhere were devastating, with towns and cities hardest hit. Florence was one extreme case, where at least 60% of the population perished. Perhaps half of the population of Paris and London died. In total, as much as a third of Europe's population died and would not recover to pre-plague levels until the 17th century. As Europe's citizens succumbed in vast numbers to the plague, paranoia and religious fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the Black Death. The rumour spread that the cause lay in wells that had been deliberately poisoned by various groups such as beggars or Romani but especially Jews. The first massacre of Jews occur in Toulon, France in April 1348. By 1351 over 200 Jewish communities had suffered, with one of the worst massacres in Strasbourg, Germany where about 2,000 Jews were publicly burnt to death. Fleeing from the horror, Jews made their way east, mainly to Poland and subsequently Russia. The plague peaked in Europe and the Mediterranean between 1347 to '53, but came back repeatedly in different strains throughout the 14th to 17th centuries, though never as virulently as this first outbreak. The Black Death was one of the worst pandemics in history, along with the Antonine Plague that struck the Roman Empire around 165, the Justinian Plague that struck the Byzantine Empire around 541, the plagues that killed perhaps 90% of the population of the Americas after the arrival of Christopher Columbus, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. It had a number of social effects on Medieval Europe. Despite the dramatic fall in the population, the production and commerce that Europe had enjoyed since the 13th century was largely maintained. Those peasants and urban workers who survived found their situation to be much improved, with labour shortages prompting wages to shoot-up, greater social mobility, and the further loosening of the bonds of Feudalism. The Christian Church was hit very hard as the primary carers for the sick and dying, and there was a severe shortage of clergy in the aftermath. Those who replaced the losses were often hastily trained, playing a part in the decline of clerical discipline, at a time when the Church lacked leadership with the ongoing Great Papal Schism. At the same time, a new educated secular class began to emerge from universities such as John Wycliffe (d. 1384), a major early influencers of the Protestant Reformation. Another incidental effect was a dramatic increase in building in brick with slate roofs, rather than wood with thatched roofs where rats liked to live. Hundred Years' War (1369–89) The French never paid the ransom for King John II and he died still in captivity, bringing to the throne, Charles V Valois (1364-1380 AD). With the help of talented advisers, Charles' skillful management of the kingdom allowed him to restore the prestige of the royal family, replenish the treasury, and bring about a revival of French fortunes. At the centre of his statecraft was a consistent policy to emphasising the divine nature of kingship. It began with his coronation at Reims, where with great pomp and ceremony, he was anointed with sacred oil supposedly brought from heaven by the Holy Spirit for the baptism of King Clovis in 496 AD; this elaborate ceremony later proved crucial in re-uniting France under his grandson, Charles VII. He restored stability to the realm, neutralising unruly nobles, cracking-down on the plundering of out-of-work mercenariens, and establishing the first permanent army paid with regular wages. He also arranged the marriage of his second son to Margaret of Flanders, one of the most eligible heiresses in France, thwarting an English attempt to expand their continental lands. The reign of Charles V was dominated by hostilities with England, but he eschewed direct confrontation at least in his early reign, instead undermining their position through more subtle tactics. Both Charles V and Edward the Black Prince, Duke of Aquitaine, embroiled themselves in a succession crisis in Spanish Castile. Although the prince's militarily campaigns were largely successful, the claimant supported by the French eventually prevailed, leaving him deep in debt. The cost of the campaign had to be met by heavy taxation in Aquitaine, which triggered resistance amongst the locals. Charles V leapt at the opportunity to exploit the situation, summoning the Black Prince to Paris in 1369 to answer the complaints of his vassals. When Edward refused, hostilities resumed openly. This time conditions favoured the French, with Edward III too old to campaign, and the Black Prince falling into a protracted illness that eventually killed him. Where his grandfather and father had tended to plunge into battle, Charles V chose a strategy of attrition, with small-scale offensives on multiple fronts. Meanwhile France's new alliance with Castile gave them access to one of the largest and best equipped fleets in Europe. After the Franco-Spanish navel victory at the Battle of La Rochelle (1372 AD), the English command of the sea came to an end. As the prestige of Charles V grew, the English position continued to weaken, with Edward the Black Prince dying in June 1376 and Edward III himself 12-months later. This brought to the English throne a ten-year-old child, Richard II Plantagenet (1377-99). By the time peace was agreed in the Treaty of Bruges (1389 AD), the English continental holdings had been reduced to small territories around the ports of Bordeaux, Brest, and Calais. With both sides war-weary and raked by internal strife, the peace held for several decades. Build-up to the Final Phase (1377-1415) By the time Edward III died in 1377, the townsmen and peasants of the shires were sick of the war, and the reign of Richard II (1377-99) was fraught with economic, social, and political crises. In the wake of the Black Death, England began to adapt to the changed economic situation where manpower was in short supply: wages rose sharply, eroding the profits of landowners; peasants often left manors to work for higher wages elsewhere; and peasants could take up skilled work that had previously been barred to them such as urban labour or servants in rich house. The royal government responded with a range of drastic measures to control the economy: attempts to fix wages at pre-plague levels; and fining those who refused to work for low wages. The measures were virtually unenforceable, and applied in an arbitrary fashion. Furthermore, this was the first time the authorities had allied itself with the landowners in quite such a blatant fashion. Meanwhile, to finance the increasingly expensive and unsuccessful war with France, just before Edward's death, a poll tax of one shilling per head was introduced, and subsequently steadily increased. Designed to spread the cost of the war over a broader economic base, again these taxes affected commoners much more than the lords. Protests, attacks on tax collectors, and civil disorder became commonplace, and when the authorities tried to crack-down in the spring of 1381, a popular rebellion ensued; the Peasants Revolt (1381). Widespread outbreaks occurred through the southeast of England, especially Essex and Kent. As news of the uprisings spread, under the leadership of Wat Tyler the Essex and Kentish rebels grew in numbers and advanced on London, which was relatively undefended because of the war in France. In London, several building were burned and looted. Without the forces to disperse the rebels, Richard II tried to negotiated with the rebels, but that same day, they assaulted the Tower of London and murders two members of the Privy Council held responsible for the poll tax. On 15 June, the young king showed considerable courage in meeting with Wat Tyler in person at Smithfield. What exactly happen at the meeting is unclear, but a scuffle seems to have broken-out with members of the royal party, and Tyler was stabbed to death. Afterwards, the rebellion in London was quickly crushed, but further outbreaks spread to Norfork and Yorkshire. These rebellions quickly petered out when concessions were granted including a general amnesty and the repeal of the poll tax; England would not see another poll tax until 1989. However, once the danger had past, Richard went back on the promise and hunted down the ringleaders of the rebellions; some 1,500 were executed. Years later when Richard was in need of popular support, he would find he had none. The events of the Peasants’ Revolt may have given Richard II an exalted idea of his own power. On coming of age, he dismissed the advisors who had overseen his minority, and surrounded himself with a group of unpopular favourites. Furthermore he abandoned the war with France. Richard's weak but autocratic rule made him many enemies, and he found himself opposed by a group of noblemen known to history as the Lords Appellant; appealing to have his closest advisors removed. A crisis was precipitated in 1386 when the king needed to raise new taxes, and parliament insisted on the dismissal of his favourites. In the end he was forced to agree to a new Privy Council led by his uncle John of Gaunt (d. 1399) which essentially took over the government. Over the next 9 years, Richard gradually managed to recover his authority. As part of his efforts to secure his throne, he banished Henry Bolingbroke for ten years, the son of John of Gaunt and heir to the duchy of Lancaster. Bolingbroke departed peacefully to Paris, but the following year Richard pushed him too far. When John of Gaunt died in 1399, the king confiscated his vast Lancastrian inheritance, and declared Bolingbroke's banishment for life. Richard, seemingly secure, went off to campaign in Ireland. Henry Bolingbroke however returns to England, easily raising sufficient noble and popular support his cause. By the time Richard II returned from Ireland in September, his support had melted away, and he surrendered at Conwy, Wales without a fight. On the following day a special parliament was held in Westminster where Richard was forced to abdicate, and Bolingbroke ascended the throne as Henry IV; Richard died in prison four months later probably from neglect and starvation. Nevertheless, the 22 year reign of Richard II was a period when England was beginning to hold her own in learning and the arts. The whole of England was buzzing with the radical ideas of Oxford theologian John Wycliffe (d. 1384), an important predecessor of the Protestant Reformation; the Wycliffe's Bible was the first complete English language Bible. England also produced one of the outstanding examples of late Medieval literature in Geofrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387), as well as some of the best painting of the age such as the Wilton Diptych (''1395). '''Henry IV Lancaster' (1399-1413) ascended to the English throne with broad acclaim. He was a warrior of great renown who had traveled to Jerusalem, and had a reputation for affability and statesmanship. Nevertheless, he was undeniably a usurper, a grandson of Henry III but far from next in the line of succession; the questions of legitimacy would eventually erupt into the War of the Roses. Much of Henry's own reign was plagued with plots and rebellions, and with each his regime became more repressive. The unrest prompt the last great uprising of Welsh nationalism, led by Owain Glyn Dwr (d. 1415). The Welsh lords had generally supported Richard II, and after his removal they found their opportunities severely limited. Meanwhile, Richard had had no son, so there had been a long period with no Prince of Wales, so in 1400 the Welsh proclaimed their own. Under Glyn Dwr's leadership the uprising grew in strength, despite an early defeat. A breakthrough came with the capture in 1402 of Edmund Mortimer, an English lord with estates on the Welsh borders as well as family in Northumberland. Glyn Dwr persuaded Mortimer to join the Welsh cause, while Henry Percy of Northumberland went into open rebellion against Henry IV. By 1404, Glyn Dwr had captured the important English strongholds of Aberystwyth and Harlech, and began to truly rule as Prince of Wales. Yet it proved the high water mark for the rebels. The tide turned again by another man proclaimed Prince of Wales, the son of Henry IV; the future Henry V. Through the campaign of the younger Henry, by 1408 Glyn Dwr had lost Aberystwyth and Harlech, and two years later was reduced to the status of an outlaw. He's believed to have died somewhere in hiding in about 1415. While the dream of independence had crumbled, the Welsh would get the last ironic laugh; a reverse takeover of the English throne by Welsh nobleman, Henry VII Tudor. Meanwhile, by the time Henry V Lancaster (1413-22) succeeded his father to the English throne, the country was calm and ready to exploit France's own turmoil. In the background to the Hundred Years War, the antagonism between England and France embroiled and intertwined itself in wider European geopolitics, most notable an ongoing struggle within the Catholic Church which eventually erupted into the Great Papal Schism (1378-1417 AD). Since 1309, the Pope had been based not in Rome but in the French enclave of Avignon, but such a setting was not natural: the prestige the Popes derived from the Holy See of St Peter in Rome; and their secular territorial base was the Papal States in Italy. So in 1377, Pope Gregory XI (1370-78) returned the papal curia to Rome. After almost seventy years on French soil, the papal curia was French in its methods and to a large extent in its staff, and back in Rome some degree of tension between French and Italian factions was inevitable. Gregory however died within a year of the return, and the election of the new pope took place in the midst of rioting in Rome. Pope Urban VI (1778-89) from Naples was an attempt to find a compromise between the two factions, but he proved a divisive figure, intransigent and temperamental. Before the end of the year, the French cardinals had declared the election illegitimate and elected a new Pope, even though Urban was still reigning. For nearly four decades Europe had two popes, one pontificating in Rome and another in Avignon. The Great Papal Schism rooted itself into almost every geopolitical conflict in Europe: France aligned with Avignon obviously so England supported the Pope in Rome; Portugal aligned against Castile in her struggle to retain independence; Scotland aligned against England; the north Italian city-states aligned against imperial Germany; and Flanders aligned against France. By 1409, all sides agreed that the conflict was undermining the esteem of the papacy. At an ecumenical council was convened at Pisa, where both existing Popes were declared illegitimate and a new Pope appointed, but the two Popes refused to resign, so now there were three. Finally in 1417, the schism was brought to an end as another council, where all of Europe's cardinals recognised Pope Martin V (1417-1431 AD) who would reside in Rome. The Great Papal Schism did not directly cause the decline in morality and discipline that the Church would endure over the next century. However, the papacy would struggle in vain to arrest the eroding of Church authority, and only ultimately succeed with the Counter-Reformation, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. Meanwhile in France, Charles V's reign marked a high point for France during the Hundred Years' War, but crisis would engulf the realm during the long reign of his son, Charles VI (1380-1422). He ascended to the throne at just eleven years old, and in later life suffered bouts of insanity and delusions; believing he was made of glass or denying he had a wife and children. The first half of his reign was dominated by his uncle, Philip of Burgundy (d. 1404), who squandered the financial resources of the kingdom, painstakingly built up by Charles V, for the personal profit. Royal forces were used to suppress an uprising in Flanders, where Philip's father-in-law happened to be count; a few years later inherited by Philip himself through his wife. When Philip died in 1404, a fierce struggle for power developed between the mad king's relatives, his younger brother Louis of Orléans (d. 1407) and cousin John of Burgundy (d. 1419), son of Philip. When John instigated the murder of Louis in a Paris street in 1407, the conflict degenerated into a civil war between John's supporters and his opponents led by Bernard of Armagnac; the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War (1407-35). The crisis would paralyse France for three decades, and was further complicated by a third warlike power on the scene, England. Hundred Years' War (1415–53) In 1415, the new English king, Henry V (1413-22), hoping to exploit the French civil war, renewed his claim to the French throne. He crossed the Channel with a force of some 10,500 men, and seized the port of Harfleur on the Seine estuary, after a five weeks siege. In the face of the greater threat from the English, the Armagnac and Burgundian factions negotiated a hasty truce. A large French army seemed content to harass and block the English to starve them into submission, as they marched north towards Calais to withdraw from the French campaign. However, with his army very low on food, Henry V force them into battle, some 25 miles south of Calais. The Battle of Agincourt (October 1415) is one of the most famous battles in English history. Henry V personally led his troops into battle on Saint Crispin's Day, while Charles VI was mental incapacitated at the time and the French lacked coherant leadership. The English took up position in a narrow valley hemmed by dense woodland, with his forces arranged in the favoured English defensive formation, with bowmen on each wing and infantry in the centre, all provided with stakes to plant in the ground as an instant palisade. There had been very heavy rain on the previous night, which the initial French cavalry charges turned into some resembling a boggy ploughed field. The leadership and conditions favoured the English, and Agincourt proved the third great English victory and an overwhelming disaster for the French; some 6000 Frenchmen were killed including perhaps 40% of the French nobility. Henry V and his army reached Calais four days later, and sailed back to England in triumph. After raising further funds for the war, Henry V returned to France in 1417, and began a systematic campaign to subjugate Normandy. The capital Rouen finally fell in January 1419 after a six month siege, turning the home of his Norman ancestors English for the first time in two centuries. Meanwhile, the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War reignited, with the Burgundian faction blaming the Armagnacs for the disaster of Agincourt. Furthermore, with the death of the elder sons of Charles VI, the future Charles VII became Dauphin, a supporter of the Armagnac faction and less conciliatory than his brothers had been. A bitter civil war was fought around Paris, which eventually fell to the Burgundians in May 1418, forcing the Dauphin to flee to Bourges. From this position of strength, John of Burgundy met with the Dauphin to negotiate an advantageous peace, but at that meeting was murdered. Rather than break the Burgundian faction however, the murder ended any hope of settling the civil war. Charles VI's queen, Isabella, brought her incapacitated husband into the Burgundian camp, and now the mad king and his heir were on opposite sides of the struggle, in which both factions were committed to the each others destruction, even if it meant an alliance with the English enemy. In 1420, Henry V signed an alliance with the Burgundian faction, who controlled Paris and most of northern France. The Treaty of Troyes was extraordinarily advantageous to the English cause; Henry V married Catherine, daughter of King Charles VI of France. Within a year, they had a son. Within two years, Henry V and Charles VI were both dead. For the second time in the Hundred Years' War, a king of England had a valid claim to the French crown; the infant Henry VI '(1422-1461 AD) It is hardly surprising that passionate French patriotism would resist the prospect of an English king on the French throne. However, it is unusual that the symbol of that resistance would be a young illiterate peasant-girl, '''Joan of Arc '(d. 1431). Joan had for some years been hearing voices, which she believed were the Archangel Michael and various other saints. In late 1428, Joan was given very specific instructions of how to turn the tide of the war; she must raise the ongoing English siege of Orléans, so that the Dauphin could go to English controlled Reims to be crowned in the cathedral where for centuries kings of France had received their coronations. Through sheers persistence, she was eventually granted an audience with the Dauphin in February 1429. Her reputation as a woman possessed must have preceded her, for the Dauphin conceals himself among his courtiers as a test. Joan immediately identified him, and told him of her mission. The political merits of the plan were obvious, to be crowned with the sacred oil at Reims would bolster his legitimacy with the common people; his rival, seven year old Henry VI, was safely back in England and had had no coronation at Reims. So Joan was provided her with some of his household knights, and allowed to join a convoy en-route for Orléans. Joan and her soldiers reached Orléans in late April 1429, which had been besieged by the English for six months, attempting to starve-out the garrison because they lacked the forces for a direct assault. Armed and dressed like a man, fighting at least as bravely as a man, her charisma breathed new confidence into the French force. One by one the English positions fell, and within ten days their army was in full retreat. Joan was no military commander but her arrival and the subsequent breaking of the siege gave credence to her message; that god was on the side of the French. With her arrival on the scene, she had effectively turned the longstanding Anglo-French conflict into a holy war. Meanwhile, the retreating English army was pursued and forced to stand and fight at the Battle of Patay (June 1429), a decisive French victory; again Joan credited with the victory although she was with the rearguard barely involved in the fighting. Joan was now ready to complete the second part of her mission, the coronation of Charles VII at Reims, 150 miles within English or Burgundian held territory. Yet Joan's magic continued to work, as town after town freely opening their gates to the coronation party. In July at Reims, the Dauphin was crowned '''King Charles VII of France (1422-61), with for the first time the undivided allegiance of the French people. For the next ten months, Joan continued to campaign against the English and Burgundian forces, usually with considerable success. However in May 1430, she fell from her horse during a skirmish against the Burgundians at Compiègne, and taken prisoner. The English want her to expose her as a heretic. She veered between recanting to save her own life but in the end refused. On 30 May 1431, Joan of Arc was burnt alive at the stake. Few stories in history can match Joan of Arc's as an example of the immense power of inspiration; she was beatified in 1909 and canonised a saint in 1920. Nevertheless, even the death of Joan of Arc could not stem the new surge of French success. In 1435, the Duke of Burgundy acknowledged the trend and made peace with Charles VII, bringing an end to the Armagnac–Burgundian Civil War and to the alliance with England, a blow from which they would never recover. By 1437, the French had reclaimed Paris from the English, which once again became the capital, and leaving only Normandy and Aquitaine in English hands. The question for the English was no longer whether they could claim the French crown, but how much of their continental territory they could keep hold of. Yet the war descended into a long uneasy truce, which Charles VII needed to assert control over his realm. He centralised the government and reorganised the antiquated French approach to warfare into a more modern professional army, ultimately establishing the first standing army in Western Europe since Roman times. This army was also equipped with artillery, albeit not very many. The history of one of the most significant development in the story of warfare remains obscure. The Chinese were using simple gunpowder weapons in the 10th century; a spear with a pyrotechnic tip. By the 12th century, they were using small hand-cannons as short-range weapons. The Muslims reportedly were using primitive cannons against the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut (1260) and a siege weapons by 1274. The first cannons in Europe were probably used during the wars between Christians and Muslim kingdoms in Spain in the late 13th century. Both side were probably using some kind cannons throughout the Hundred Years' War, but with little effect. The first engagement in which cannons played a decisive role was at the Battle of Formigny (April 1450) in Normandy. For much of the battle the English bowmen achieved their now customary success, but with two small cannons the French won the day. After reclaiming Normandy, the same pattern was repeated three years later at the Battle of Castillon (July 1453) in Aquitaine, the last major battle of the Hundred Years War, which in itself was the last great medieval conflict. The centuries of the archer was giving way to those of the gunner, and for a long time French artillery developed a reputation as the best in the world. The war was ended with the Treaty of Picquigny (1475), which left England with no possessions in France other than Calais. The treaty was intended as merely a seven-year truce, but no more was heard of this long dispute, apart from an obsessive English affection for tiny Calais and the strange custom of the English king to include "King of France" among their titles as late as 1801. For all the great sacrifice, little territory had changed hands in the French victory, other than Aquitaine. Yet the war had a huge effect on both nations. Historians have long considered the Hundred Years’ War a milestone in fostering a patriotic sense of English and French identity. For the English, they were finally cured of their taste for continental intervention, and English kings turned increasingly to the problems of internal development. Francophobia has run deep in the English consciousness ever since; the French language in England, which had served as the language of the nobility since the Norman conquests, gradually disappeared. England also held onto Calais for two hundred years, keeping open the manufacturing towns of Flanders to the English wool and cloth trade. For the French, Charles VII benefited from victory, not just over England, but over the dissident French nobles. He now directly controls nearly all of France as a centralised state, and without the anomaly of a vassal who was also an equal. By the end of the war, only Flanders and Brittany enjoyed some nominal autonomy. Before the war, tax in France had been occasional, but in the post-war era it was regular and established, paving the way for the absolutist monarchy that would characterise later centuries. England in contrast, had begun the war with more organised tax structures than France, and much greater accountability to a parliament. While some Englishmen got very rich from the plunder, the war left the government in financial trouble contributing to the War of the Roses. The Hundred Years' War was a time of rapid military evolution; weapons, tactics, army structure, and the social meaning of war all changed. Although heavy cavalry was still considered the most powerful unit in an army, several tactics developed to mitigate its effectiveness on a battlefield. Nimbler lightly armoured troops and cavalry became more common, not least bowmen. Perhaps the most lasting impact of the war, was the emergence of two powerful and permanently antagonistic nations states. It introduced the dominant theme of Europe for the next five-hundred years; the Balance of Power between the dominant powers in Europe. The first two members, England and France, would remain permanently within this group, but others would join and sometime decline and leave. This balance would see the great powers engage in a permanent economic and intellectual rivalry, an ongoing armaments race, and eventually the competitive acquisition of colonial territories. The Balance of Power would eventually see Western civilisation boast an unchallenged dominance of the world in the 19th century, until it all came crashing down in World War I. Fall of Constantinople (1453) Despite reclaiming Constantinople from the Crusaders in 1261, the Byzantine Empire was an impoverished shadow during her last two centuries. The city was hit hard by the Black death, and the population, once the largest in Europe, shrank to less than 100,000. No longer able to stand as a bulwark against the Islamic tide, the empire was failing just as a hostile new power was rising. By the late 13th century, the Muslim world was fragmented into the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Mongol Il-Khanate of Persia, one of the four division of the empire of Genghis Khan. Anatolia meanwhile was in turmoil, under a patchwork of Turkish petty-sultanates. Most of the Turks of Anatolia lived in a style in keeping with their origins, as fierce nomads of the steppes; riding out to war was their everyday activity. One of these sultanates was based around Sögüt under Osman (1299-1323 AD), the founder of the Ottoman Turkish Empire (1299–1922). The enfeebled Byzantine empire to the west of their territory provided the Ottomans with a natural target. Lacking siege-craft at first, progress was slow, strangling their victims into submission by plunder the surrounding countryside. However, the Ottoman Turks would prove themselves uncommonly adaptable. The Byzantine stronghold of Bursa fell them in 1326, Nicaea yielded in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337. Now just across the Hellespont was Constantinople, but the Ottomans preferred a roundabout route. Ironically, it was the Byzantines themselves that allowed the Ottomans a toe-hold in Europe, ceding the town of Gallipoli to them in 1354 AD during a squabble for the throne. By 1360, they had conquered Adrianople and moved their capital into Europe. By 1393, much of the Balkans was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, where their successes prompted the formation of the formidable Ottoman standing army known as the Janissaries. A human tax was imposed on these conquered Christian territories; a tribute of children, handed over as slaves and trained in the art of war. This large highly trained professional army would have great advantages while Europe was still transitioning from medieval feudal armies. Within a few decades, the Byzantines had been hemmed-in to the hinterland of Constantinople, surrounded on all sides by the Ottomans. However in 1402, the Byzantines were given a sudden reprieve while the Turks dealt with a new threat on their eastern border. Timur (d. 1405), a great Mongol conqueror in the style of Genghis Khan had risen from humble origins to seize control of Herat in Afghanistan in 1883. By 1394 he had extended his empire throughout Persia and Mesopotamia. In July 1402, Timur shattered the Ottoman army at the Battle of Ankara, and captured the Sultan, reportedly keeping him in an iron cage for the rest of his life. Timur died of an illness three years later while campaigning against Ming China. Meanwhile the Ottoman Empire took decades to re-entrench and recover after the defeat at Ankara, recovering control over many regions attempting to reassert their independence. However, the Byzantines were too weak to take advantage of this respite, and desperately appealed to Western Europe for a Crusade against the Ottomans. Howver, the response was always to convert to Catholic Christianity first; the West was still asleep to the danger of the Ottomans. When a pitiful Crusade of Hungarians and Poles finally arrived after fourteen years of negotiations in was completely annihilated at the Battle of Varna (November 1444). Constantinople’s situation turned desperate, when Mehmed II (1451-81) ascended to the sultanate of the Ottoman Empire. He started his reign as he meant to go on, by murdering the infant legitimate heir; as he later remarked “''whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behove him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order.” Mehmed made no effort to hide his intentions of conquering Constantinople. At least in Emperor Constantine XI (1449-1453 AD) the once mighty Byzantine Empire would go down fighting in the great Roman tradition. In April 1453, Mehmed II applied to Constantinople the stranglehold that had been threated for nearly a century, initiating a tight blockade of the city by both land and sea with an army of 150,000 troops, and a navy of 130 ships. Among his weapons were numerous cannons, including one more than twice as large as any yet built: the cannon weighed 19-tons; required 16 oxen and 200 men to manoeuvre it into its firing position; and could lob seven stone a day, weighing 600 pounds against the great city walls. It had been built by a Hungarian called Orban who had offered his services to the Byzantine, but the emperor could not afford his high salary. Despite having only 7,000 soldiers, Constantine XI refused to surrender, placing his faith in the immensely strong Theodosian Walls. The city walls were reduced to rubble in places, but every night the defenders would repair the rubble into defences. Only on the imperial harbour side were these walls vulnerable, and the harbour was protected by a great chain preventing enemy ships from entering. But the young sultan had an answer to that. One Sunday morning in May, the defenders on the walls awoke to see Muslim ships in the harbour, having been dragged on wheeled carriages over a 200-foot hill. With the Byzantine troops now stretched over an even longer portion of the walls, Constantine XI remarkably held out for nearly a month. At sunset on 28 May 1453 the final attack began. Every bell in the city rang the alarm, and Hagia Sophia was full of people praying. By dawn, the Turks were in the city. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, died valiantly in the fighting. Mehmed gave his troops free rein in the conquered city for three days. Only Hagia Sophia was ordered to be spared; the great church, for many centuries the most magnificent in Christendom, now began her new life as a mosque. And so, Constantinople became a great imperial centre once again; the new capital of the Ottoman Empire with a new name, Istanbul. Mehmed launched into a busy building programme in the city, founding several mosques and beginning the Topkapi Palace, the main residence and administrative headquarters of the Ottoman sultans. The population of the city had been much reduced after decades of fear and uncertainty, so Mehmed repopulated it from Greece, which became part of his empire in 1460. He also conquered Bosnia in 1464, where a large number of nobles convert to Islam, unlike neighbouring Serbia which remains largely Greek Orthodox; a distinction with resonance in more recent history. The cultural legacy of the Byzantine Empire has often been overlooked by Western European historians. Until the late 12th century, Constantinople had been by far the largest city in Europe, and as far away as Scandinavia it was simply known as ''The City. For 800 years, the stoutness of its walls blocked Europe from the seemingly irresistible Muslim tide, something no other European state could have possibly withstood. For all her often poisonous imperial court, no medieval state came close to as strong and cohesive a political system, nor as complex a fiscal and bureaucratic structure; except maybe the Muslim world. Ironically Constantinople was sacked by the Crusaders, just when England and France were looking to establish more sophisticated systems of government. Then when with the fall, Byzantine scholars fled to the West, bringing with them the classic knowledge of Greek and Roman civilisation; 40,000 of the 55,000 surviving texts were copied in Constantinople. A great part of the legacy of the Byzantine was already secured to the future. It lay in the rooting of Eastern Orthodox Christianity among the Slav and Russia peoples, as well as among the Greeks under the multi-cultural and religiously tolerant Ottoman Muslims; far more tolerant than Catholic Europe was to the Jews. Finally, Justinian the Great gifted Roman Law to Europe that formed an important basis for European law all the way down to Napoléon’s legal code of 1804 AD. Russia Tsars in particular would claim themselves the successors of the Byzantine emperors. Yet the true inheritors of the long Roman tradition were in fact the Muslim Ottoman Turks, despite how unattractive that might be for Western Europeans. Suleiman I, great-grandson of Mehmed II, went on to essentially reconstruct the Byzantine Empire of Justinian the Great, ruling some 25 million people in a more just and well-administered domain than any in Western Europe. Early Renaissance (1350-1490) From the 14th century, European intellectual life was profoundly affected by the efflorescence of arts and ideas of the Renaissance (1350-1620). The cultural movement, that coincided with the rediscovery of Roman and Greek culture, began in Italy, and then gradually spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century. Its influence was felt in literature, philosophy, painting, architecture, sculpture, music, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual inquiry. The concept of the Renaissance has been much disputed by modern historians. Some scholars consider the term to be unnecessarily loaded, implying a rebirth from the supposedly more primitive "Dark Ages", almost as if Europe in the Middle Ages was some sort of depressed class in need of historical rehabilitation. Certainly the 12th and 13th centuries were unmistakably civilised, but had little in terms of culture to compare to the Muslim or Chinese civilisation, and nothing in terms of learning. Other historians argue that classical learning was never entirely absent from European society, and the achievements were mere part of an ongoing process; stylistic hints of the coming Renaissance can be seen well before 1300. Yet the Renaissance was and is a useful myth, if we keep in mind that no clear line divides the medieval and Renaissance. Certainly people at the time believed that they were living in an era that was special. As Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457) said, “''I do not know why the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture had been in so long and so deep a decline and almost died out together with literature itself; nor why they have come to be aroused, awoken, and come to life again in this age; nor why there is now such a rich harvest both of good artists and good writers.” There are obvious reasons why the Renaissance began in Italy. The independent-minded Italian city-states were very wealthy through trade, and money and scholarship or the arts went hand in hand. There's also a compelling theory that the Black Death helped concentrate this wealth in the hands of the survivors of the plague. These cities were dazzlingly cosmopolitan with Armenians, Turks, Greeks, Germans, and Muslims, as well as Jewish communities and other groups persecuted elsewhere in Europe who found refuge there. They were also exposed to the intellectual and artistic explosion of the Islamic Golden Age, which had collapsed with the Mongol invasion of the mid-13th century. Islamic scholars and scientists vastly contributed to the rise of European technology, science and medicine during the Scientific Revolution that ran in parallel with the Renaissance. For instance, some of the diagrams in Nicolaus Copernicus' formulated a model of the universe are so similar to an Islamic mathematics treatise that it’s almost impossible that he didn’t have access to it. If the Renaissance had a beginning, it was in the conscious revival of the study of classical Greek and Roman literature from about 1350. Scholars such as Petrarch (d. 1374), Boccaccio (d. 1375), and Bracciolini (d. 1459) devoted themselves to tracking down original manuscripts of classical texts in ancient monastery libraries, while the fall of Constantinople in 1453 generated a wave of émigré Greek scholars bringing precious manuscripts in ancient Greek, many of which had fallen into obscurity in the West. They became known as Humanists, implying an admiration for the finest achievements of the human race. In stark contrast to earlier scholars who almost exclusively studied classical works of science, philosophy and mathematics, Humanists were most interested in recovering literary, historical, and oratorical texts. Many then emulated these classics in their own imaginative literature, mostly in the Italian vernacular, such as Boccaccio' ''Decameron ''which was an important influence for Chaucer' more famous ''Canterbury Tales. The idea of Renaissance is especially linked to innovation in art. While most Humanists visited Rome and other ancient cities to copy texts and inscriptions, three Florentine friends sketched the details of the surviving buildings of classical antiquity; Brunelleschi (d. 1446) an architect, Donatello (d. 1466) a sculptor, and Masaccio (d. 1428) a painter. They were recognized in their own time as being the founders of a new direction in art; Renaissance Art. Brunelleschi was the first to evolve a scientific theory of perspective, which he used to startling effect in the Pazzi Chapel (1430) and Florence Cathedral (1436). Donatello, between 1411 and 1417, carved two free-standing figures of St Mark and St George for a merchant guildhall of Orsanmichele in a more purely classical style than anything attempted by predecessors. Masaccio’s frescoes in the chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine (1428) had a new freedom in the expression of emotion and a sense of depth that were among the great turning points of the Renaissance. The masters of classic Greece and Rome were finally being challenged. The Renaissance art movement would quickly spread throughout Italy, though for a long be most associated with Florence due to the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici; the Medici had grown immensely wealthy from a monopoly on the mining of alum, a chemical used for dying. From about 1470, Botticelli (d. 1510) was established as one of the leading painters of Florence, and also worked in Pisa and Rome. His characteristic style can be seen in two of the best loved paintings of the Renaissance: In Primavera (1478) and The Birth of Venus (1482). The ideas of the Italian Renaissance would slowly cross the Alps to the rest of Europe, but the Netherlands was an early adherent where a particularly vibrant artistic culture developed; the Northern Renaissance. The Dutch cities had strong trade and finance links with the Italian city-states, and a somewhat similar culture where wealth merchants were patrons of the arts. During the 1430s, Jan van Eyck (d. 1441) painted a series of masterpieces with a greater emphasis on naturalism and realism, starting with the altarpiece in the cathedral of Ghent. These extraordinary decades, introduced several outstanding masters, such as like Robert Campin (b. 1375), Rogier van der Weyden (b. 1400), and Hugo van der Goes (b. 1430). An early French adherent was Jean Fouquet (d. 1481), who spent four years in Italy, before returning to Tours where he painted a number of striking works like the Book of Hours, detailed miniature illustrations of scenes from the Bible and the lives of the saints. The cultural movement of the visual arts would reach its apex in the High Renaissance (1490-1529). The term Renaissance Man has come to mean someone with exceptional skills in a wide range of fields, and there were three outstanding candidates during this era: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Category:Historical Periods